


chemistry you can eat

by mercuryhatter



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cupcakes, Fluff, Multi, Polyamory, mentions of cannibalism (not graphic), mentions of canon-typical violence (not graphic), mentions of institutionalization, will graham is autistic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 15:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1434238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the premise for this is that Beverly never went into Hannibal's house illegally and without backup, Alana slept with Beverly instead of Hannibal and Beverly got her to believe Will. set some time after Will is released and Hannibal is locked up forever. the cupcakes are not people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chemistry you can eat

Most of the time, Will almost forgets that he walked into this relationship a step behind the other two, that they were already a pair before he made them three. Alana and Beverly are different enough that them being together at all was mildly surprising to most, and most of the time, Will feels more like a link than an outsider.

 

Beverly likes to bake. This surprised Will at first, but she explained, laughing, as if it was obvious, “it’s chemistry you can eat!” And she does sometimes slip into lab safety procedure, he notices, wafting the smell of milk towards her to check for spoil, a steadying hand beneath the measuring cup as she pours without spilling a drop. But she also eats batter from the bowl with her fingers, smears it over Alana’s nose, and instead of the quiet laser focus she has in the lab, she’s loud and full of laughter, singing bits of Queen that she blames on the other two scientists, Alanis Morrisette that she blames on Alana.

 

Will doesn’t like kitchens much. He never was much of a cook, never quite grew past the college stage of getting most of his food out of cans. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t ever accidentally tasted canned dog food. And now, well, he thinks he can be forgiven if kitchens make him nervous.

 

Alana hates to bake but she has an arsenal of decorating paraphernalia, tubes and tips and candies and sprinkles and oddly shaped utensils. It’s lucky, because Beverly’s idea of decorating involves sticking a spoonful of canned frosting in her mouth and following it up with a bite of cupcake. Alana is meticulous about her decorating, shaping roses and adding food coloring with far more caution and precision than the task should really take. Beverly’s food tastes like heaven but Alana makes it look like it.

 

They fit together that way. They move around the kitchen like they’ve been doing it for years, gracefully dodging each other, calling warnings as hot trays are removed from the oven, flicking water at each other’s faces after washing hands. Rehashing the same endless arguments about psychology versus forensic science (the sides in that one are obvious), Kirk versus Janeway (Beverly for the first, Alana for the second), whether or not fondant is worth it (Alana loves it for the shapes she can make with it but Beverly thinks it tastes awful). This is one of the few times that Will is conscious of the fact that he missed something. It’s hard for him to conceptualize that while he was locked up and fighting, there were people existing in the world other than himself and Hannibal Lecter, people who did things like talk and laugh and learn to dance around each other in the kitchen. He doesn’t resent them for it, exactly. He has to trace through a half-remembered “emotion wheel” to find the right word: sad, guilty, lonely, regret. No one word is quite right but regret comes the closest. He wants there to be a world out there where he can look at a kitchen without smelling blood, where he met Alana in a park and Beverly in a bar and they had dates that involved fewer dead bodies and seizures and more kisses on the front porch and walks in a dog park hovering just on the edge of holding hands.

 

If that world is out there, this Will Graham isn’t in it, but that’s all right, because neither is this Alana Bloom or this Beverly Katz, and all of them have nightmares, and all of them have certain topics deleted from their lexicons, and all of them have this incredibly dark tunnel in their lives that they’re only just now fighting their way out of. So while they cook Will plays with the new white husky, Sugar, a sweet dog who has aggression issues while she’s eating, and Beverly bakes up a batch of dog treats that she refuses to let Alana touch with her frosting tips, and Sugar doesn’t snap at the other dogs today, and Will eats too many red velvet cupcakes and laughs while Beverly pulls off the fondant roses and sticks them in Alana’s hair when she’s not looking.

  
It’s not perfect, but it couldn’t really be better if it tried. 


End file.
